{"id":785817,"date":"2026-07-07T10:11:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T10:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/785817\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T10:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T10:11:10","slug":"jannik-sinner-is-serving-his-way-through-wimbledon-as-familiar-foes-lie-in-wait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/785817\/","title":{"rendered":"Jannik Sinner is serving his way through Wimbledon as familiar foes lie in wait"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London \u2014 Just in time for the most intense part of Wimbledon<\/a>, London is heating up.<\/p>\n

Jannik Sinner, the defending men\u2019s champion and world No. 1 who has shown a propensity to melt in hot weather, regardless of the opponent, will take on Jan-Lennard Struff in the quarterfinals Tuesday, on an 85-degree afternoon in the British capital.<\/p>\n

If he can get through the 36-year-old German, who is a dangerous foe on the grass, he\u2019s likely to play a much more familiar one in the semifinals: 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic could be waiting for Sinner, 24, under a bright, 87-degree sun on Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Ahead of the tournament, Italy\u2019s Sinner said he and his team have committed to more hot-weather training, to acclimate his body to a schedule that feels it grows hotter every year.<\/p>\n

But at this edition of Wimbledon, Sinner\u2019s issues have so far been more prosaic, and the fix easier to find. His baseline game is out of rhythm. His serve is the vicious metronome<\/a> keeping him on the straight and narrow.<\/p>\n

Why do players wear white at Wimbledon?<\/p>\n

Ava Wallace and Madison Eades<\/p>\n

Sinner called out his serve after his fourth-round win over Shintaro Mochizuki, the world No. 151 from Japan. Sinner won the first set comfortably in 33 minutes, but the match appeared to tighten in the second set, when it headed into a tiebreak. If Mochizuki was going to have a chance to get his teeth into the match, this was it.<\/p>\n

Really, Mochizuki never had a chance, even if on the surface it looked\u00a0like Sinner might be in for another long day, after having gone five sets against Serbia\u2019s Miomir Kecmanovi\u0107 in the first round.<\/p>\n

In the second set against Mochizuki, Sinner landed over 70 percent of his first serves, and he won 24 of 28 points when he did. He smacked 10 aces. Overall, he played 38 points on his serve, and on 17 of them, he didn\u2019t have to hit a second shot.<\/p>\n

He served on just three of the seven points in the tiebreak, which he won 7-0. An Ace. A kicker onto the T that had Mochizuki on the back foot, then a slice out wide that Mochizuki dumped into the net.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like I was serving well at times, especially important moments today,\u201d Sinner said in his news conference. \u201cThat helped me also being a bit more freer in the return games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Therein lies the Sinner blueprint for the rest of the Wimbledon fortnight, if he is going to lift the trophy for a second consecutive year. He is not the player he was in the early clay-court season, when he won three consecutive tournaments \u2014\u00a0 the Monte Carlo Masters, the Madrid Open and the Italian Open. He won the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and the Miami Open before them, but even in that dominant hard-court run, there were signs of slippage.<\/p>\n

Then, Sinner used his serve dominance to offset shakiness in his baseline game, especially on his forehand. Nothing got worse in a meaningful sense, but in tennis, a sport of such fine margins, tiny changes in win rate \u2014 especially on the most common kinds of points \u2014 can have a big impact.<\/p>\n

In early 2026, his serving earned him a one percent increase on his average win rate on points that last between zero and four shots. That doesn\u2019t sound a lot. But that\u2019s the most common point in tennis, and as Sinner\u2019s win rate on points over nine shots slipped four percent below average, the one percent shift did enough offsetting for him to keep winning.<\/p>\n

The most devastating version of Sinner, who mauls opponents from the back of the court<\/a>, showcases masterful touch when he comes forward and still serves like a metronome, may yet appear.<\/p>\n

After melting and cramping in the third round of the French Open against Juan Manuel Cer\u00fandolo, the world No. 54 at the time, Sinner took a well-deserved rest. He didn\u2019t play a competitive match until Wimbledon, where he was understandably rusty against Kecmanovi\u0107.<\/p>\n

This is an era when having a killer serve to use as a pressure-release valve has never been a more valuable weapon in both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s game. Players are so athletic, and so many points can flip from offense, to defense and back again, that as long as the rest of a player\u2019s game is solid, an effective serve can become something of a fortress.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially true on grass, where a ball skids and slides and slices off the court instead of popping up like it does on clay and some hard courts. Four-time major champion Naomi Osaka, who has long struggled on grass, has made opponents feel like they can\u2019t breathe during the first week as she has set the pace for serving in the women\u2019s tournament, nailing corners with her 120 mph bombs.<\/p>\n

Sinner is frustrating opponents who feel powerless to make any headway, no matter how close the score might look at any given point in a match and no matter how much they might feel that they can hurt him from the baseline.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe served well, so I couldn’t break any games,\u201d Mochizuki said after his three-set loss to Sinner. \u201cThat cost me a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has been coming for a while for Sinner. Beginning when he made the switch in 2022 from a platform stance (feet apart) to a pinpoint stance (feet together) before the jump in his motion, Sinner\u2019s serve has become far more than simply a point-starter. That allowed him to jump a couple inches higher and hit down on the ball more.<\/p>\n

It was largely responsible for taking down Novak Djokovic in four sets in 2024 at the Australian Open, when the best male returner of the modern era not named Andre Agassi could not manage a break point in a five-set match for the first time in his career.<\/p>\n

\"Jannik<\/p>\n

\n Jannik Sinner’s serving has carried him through difficult moments. (Cameron Spencer \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

More than two years later, Sinner\u2019s serve has had its moments of dysfunction. He struggled with it at the U.S. Open last summer, especially in the final, when he landed just 48 percent of his first serves and Carlos Alcaraz duly blew him off the court.<\/p>\n

This Wimbledon has been the opposite of that. He has smacked 81 aces in four matches. That\u2019s the equivalent of five \u201cfree\u201d games each match.<\/p>\n

His first-serve percentage is a reliable 66 percent, and he\u2019s winning 85 percent of those points. More than half of his successful first serves are going unreturned.<\/p>\n

A scattergraph of his opponents\u2019 contact points when they are returning his serve shows a frightening number of dots outside or on the edge of the tramlines. Sinner isn\u2019t much for serving into an opponent\u2019s body. Just a handful of balls land in the middle third of the service box.<\/p>\n

All of this means no one can get their hopes up too high when the serve does get returned. Sinner is winning 69 percent of those points, the best in the field.<\/p>\n

The question now is whether that will be enough to neutralize what might be Sinner\u2019s most potent foe this week \u2014 the weather. He brushed away a question about the forecast after his win over Mochizuki, claiming he knew little about the coming heat, just as much as he pushed back against the idea that the weather had felled him in Paris right after it happened.<\/p>\n

In London two weeks ago, he reversed course and allowed that he had a problem that needed fixing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did a good preparation,\u201d he said. \u201cWhatever happened in the past, it’s gone already. Now we see if we found a solution. If not, we keep working for the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knows how the pressure ratchets up in the final round of a Grand Slam. He said he\u2019s ready for it this time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is definitely more tension. In the same time, I’m very happy where I am at the moment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London \u2014 Just in time for the most intense part of Wimbledon, London is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-785817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}